Istwa Nou

Haiti wrote a new constitution in 1932 while the American occupation was still winding down. The convention sat under elected president Sténio Vincent and included Pierre Hudicourt, Jean Price-Mars, Denis St Aude and Dumarsais Estimé. Haitian women had reason to think the moment might be theirs. Article 8 came out of the convention untouched: male citizens aged twenty one and over remained the only people entitled to vote. The legal scholar Mirlande Manigat explained the reasoning that prevailed, which was that the urgent business of the day was the balance between the branches of government and the end of the occupation, so the question of women could wait. The women waited actively. Through the occupation they had built relationships with Caribbean and African American women, including women in the Dominican Republic, which the Americans were also occupying. That partnership lasted through the winter of 1934 and no longer, since Dominican feminism was quickly absorbed into the anti Haitian doctrine Rafael Trujillo was promoting. Haitian feminists still say a Dominican woman helped shape their founding plans.

In the first months of 1934 Alice Garoute and Madeleine Sylvain drew up plans for an organisation they called La Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale. In February Sylvain invited a chosen group of women to talk it through. Over several meetings they settled on a philosophy, a structure and a platform. The philosophy was to improve the economic, intellectual, social and political condition of Haitian women. By March the organisation had elected an executive committee of eight, and the rest of the membership, close to a hundred within three weeks, was sorted into six subcommittees. Those committees wrote a platform covering the physical, intellectual and moral condition of Haitian women, a sharper sense among them of what society was owed, and protection for children, for women and for the old. The speed says something about how much groundwork already existed. The fundraising campaigns, the reading groups, the salon arguments and the ten thousand women who had marched in front of the Forbes Commission were rehearsals for this.